Armchair Hockey Scout

Ask the book

2026-27 edition Ask a direct question about this edition of the book — who, how many, how common, which group more — and it is answered with a table computed on this page from the edition’s index: the season line, height and age, the on-ice percentiles, the grades and the traits read out of every report. Ask for a view on named players — what a comparison comes down to, what makes a man — and you get the book’s reading of their own pages, and only those. The model turns your question into a query and phrases the result, or reads the pages it is handed; it never originates a figure, and an answer carrying a figure that is on neither the table nor the pages is withheld. It does not forecast, and it says so when a question is outside what the book holds.

Tables are computed on this page from the 2026-27 edition’s index; readings rest on the players’ own pages; the model never counts. Twenty questions an hour.

Ben Meyers

Photo by Jenn G, CC BY-SA 2.0

Ben Meyers

Seattle Kraken Center #59

Undrafted, 5-11, and the 66th percentile.

SeasonTeamGPGAPTS+/-PIMPPSHGWSS%TOI
2021-22COL5101-20000812.59:57
2022-23COL39404-660003312.19:36
2023-24COL/ANA23123-46000128.310:07
2024-25SEA8000-2200040.08:21
2025-26SEA527815-12160026111.511:56
2026-27 so far—————————————
Career—127131023-263000211811.010:35

This Season So Far

The 2026-27 season has not started. The empty row above is his, and both it and this paragraph fill in on their own from the morning after he first plays: what he has done, what it is worth against his own last season, and the run he is on when the two disagree.

Last Season

7 goals and 8 assists in 52 games — 15 points, minus-12, at 11:56 a night with 16 penalty minutes.

The Finesse Game

Modest volume from good ice. 88 unblocked attempts, 7 goals, median 24 feet with 47 per cent from inside 20.

23 points in 127 career games is a fourth-line rate and it is what he is. 8 assists in 52 games says the same.

The Physical Game

5-11, 194, and compact rather than heavy. 16 penalty minutes.

He forechecks with real speed, kills penalties, and gets to the interior for a man his size more often than most fourth-liners do.

The Intangibles

49.5 per cent of the expected goals, 50th percentile, against only 46 per cent of the shot attempts, 18th, across 537 minutes.

That is the fourth-best chance share on the roster, and it comes with a 5-point gap between chances and attempts — fewer shots, considerably better ones.

The minus-12 sits on top of goals that went 22-34, so unlike most of the minus figures in this book it is not a special-teams artefact: the five-on-five ice lost by exactly that much, against chances that were level at 20.9 to 21.4.

2 points in his last 10. He is 27, undrafted out of Minnesota and a former college captain, and on a club with this much trouble in its own end he is quietly one of the few forwards who does not have it.

What kind of player

The searchable half of the report. The first group is computed from the season's own data; the rest are read out of the prose above, and each one carries the sentence that produced it. A subject the report never raised is simply absent.

  • measuredcomputed here from the season's own data

Each computed tag also says how well its measure holds up from one season to the next, because a tag describes a season that has finished and a reader will assume it predicts the one coming. Some do and some do not, and the gap is wide: five-on-five workload repeats well, scoring late does not repeat at all.

  • hard-minutes· is started in his own end, against the other club's best

    21% of his end-zone starts in the attacking end, 1st percentile among forwards

    Season to season, this measure repeats well (0.66) · 50% keep it

The numbers underneath

On the ice

Five-on-five, 2025-26 · 537 minutes

Expected goals
49.5%
50th pct

share of the chances while he was out there

Shot attempts
45.6%
16th pct

share of the attempts while he was out there

Goals while he was on the ice: 22 for, 34 against. Expected: 20.9 and 21.4.

The eye and the numbers

Sighted
Report
38th
Numbers
50th

The two rank him within 12 points of one another. It was written with these numbers on screen, so the agreement is not corroboration — the arithmetic is on both sides of it.

Both bars are percentiles among the 656 skaters in this edition with a report and enough ice time. The report bar ranks the mean of the grades above — 70 on their own scale — against every other report's mean. The numbers bar ranks his share of expected goals. A gap is a disagreement about where he belongs, not two scales talking past each other.

Tracked

NHL Edge, 2025-26 · 52 games

Top speed
22.8 mph
80th pct

fastest he was clocked all season; the league's average best is 22.2

Bursts over 20 mph
1.44 a game

how often he reaches that speed, not how fast he goes

Distance
2.06 miles a game

skated, all strengths

Hardest shot
89.6 mph
81st pct

one shot; the league's average best is 83.6

A top speed is a season's best, and a man who takes more shifts gets more tries at one; the percentile is the feed's own, against every skater, and says less between a top-pair defenceman and a fourth-line wing than it does between two men in the same job. The counts are shown per game for the same reason.

Recent form

Last 20 appearances, 2025-26, oldest first

2

points in his last 10 games — 1 goals, 1 assists, 13 shots

Each bar is one game by points. Filled bars are games he scored in.

Usual linemates

2025-26 · 537 minutes at five-on-five

Share of his five-on-five ice time spent alongside each player, measured from shift charts. Special teams are excluded: a power-play unit is not a line.

Why the numbers land there

Five-on-five, 2025-26

The club
SEA took 46.0% of the expected goals as a club. His own share is 49.5% — 3.5 above the club he did it on.
The role
Fourth line, 537 minutes at five-on-five — 20th percentile in ice time.

With and without

TeammateTogetherHim apartMate apart
Ryan Winterton50.9%47.8%46.8%
Jacob Melanson52.3%47.5%48.3%
Adam Larsson48.0%50.3%44.2%

50.9% together, 47.8% for him apart and 46.8% for Winterton apart. Both were worse apart, so whatever the two of them had together was doing real work.

Expected-goal share while both were on the ice, and for each man in the minutes he played without the other. Apart is the pair subtracted from his own totals. It does not settle who was carrying whom — apart from each other, both were still playing with somebody — but it does say whether the share travelled when the pairing broke up.

Where he shoots from

goal on goal missed

88 unblocked shots in 2025-26, 7 of them goals. His median goal came from 9 feet. 47% of his shots came from inside twenty feet, 23% from beyond forty.